Robert Crumb - part two

Controversial American artist Robert Crumb discussed his medley of comic characters, his acid-fuelled days, existentialism and crosshatching with the Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell at the National Film Theatre, before answering questions from the audience, below.

'The whole visceral element of life is just horrifying' ... Robert Crumb at the NFT. Photo: Sarah Lee

Steve Bell: At this point, shall we throw it out to the audience? I know there are a lot of questions I didn't ask.

Question 1: When we saw the Derangement slide earlier, one frame reminded me of a panel by Carl Barks.

Robert Crumb: He was a big influence on me. Steal from the best, I always say.

Question 2: There is heavy irony in your work which works for knowing, left-leaning audiences such as this one. But can you comment on how this squares with giving vent to things from your personal experience.

RC: You mean my sex perversions and things like that?

Questioner: Racial fears, experiences of child abuse.

SB: The guy's got a point because you take reality straight on the chin and deal with things in a very direct way, which I don't think any cartoonist before you did. You've not shied away from things.

RC: I wasn't the first to do straight, personal, autobiographical comics though.

SB: You've made it your own.

RC: Even before I did autobiographical stuff, I was revealing my deepest weirdness on paper. But the first person to do deeply personal autobiographical stuff was Justin Green, who did Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. That was the first one. Then Aline was probably the second one. She did it before I did. She was inspired by Justin Green, a lot more than me.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb: I saw in Justin's work a way in which I could express myself. And once you do that, you sort of can't stop, and you just tell all. There's just something satisfying about it.

RC: By now, I'm sure that the two of us are probably among the few people on the planet who have absolutely no secrets left that the whole world doesn't know. We have no shame.

Question 3: You complained earlier this evening about your New Yorker assignment in Cannes. Why did you even accept that commission?

AKC: He didn't complain.

RC: Why did we accept that? Well, it pays well.

AKC: He didn't complain. It was interesting to do.

RC: Doing comics with Aline is actually easy because I just feed her with these lead lines and she comes up with the Jewish wisecracks.

AKC: Like George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Question 4: When all this personal stuff came out and became popular...

RC: How did I feel? Extremely embarrassed. I can't actually be in the same room with someone who's reading one of those personal comics. When I'm drawing it I don't actually realise that thousands of people will be reading this. I can't think about that because I wouldn't be able to do it.

Question 5: At what age was your daughter allowed to see your work?

RC: We never pushed it in front for her. We feared it might be too disturbing for her that her parents had those ideas.

AKC: But we didn't make a big deal of it either way. But sometimes she'd pass by and see something sexual and go, "Uggh! Kissing!"

RC: Years later, she admitted that she went and actually read all that stuff when she was about 19 or 20.

AKC: She kind of censored herself.

RC: Our work is definitely not for kids.

AKC: But if you take it away and hide it, like something forbidden, then it makes an even bigger issue out of it.

RC: I've had letters from guys who snuck the comics from their dads and read them and that's where they got all their ideas about sex, from my comics.

AKC: What about Phoebe Gloeckner? She's a great cartoonist now, in her 40s. She wrote a letter to me, saying that she found our comics under her mother's bed when she was 14, and she read them and wrote to us, saying that she wanted to come live with us and have us as her parents. But she's a great cartoonist now.

RC: But she's totally crazy.

Question 6: I'm Robert's dealer.

AKC: His art dealer.

Questioner: For a long time there's been a sort of hierarchy of art, where cartooning was perceived as the lowest form. But it seems to me that this hierarchy no longer exists. Robert's work has been shown at the Ludwig in Cologne; in one exhibition, Robert's work filled one end of one museum while Louise Bourgeois's work filled the other.

RC: It's sort of bewildering. I don't understand why museums are now interested in my work. I guess there's always a big chasm between the galleries and the world of published art. I'm a wedge. They're really reluctant to put stuff that's printed and put it on the pedestal next to stuff by Picasso. I think I'm as good as Picasso. [chuckles]

SB: I think it's to do with the perception that comics are not serious.

RC: Yeah, it's seen as a joke. How can that be deep, profound art?

SB: I think comic art is the mother of the arts; no, the grandmother of the arts. They used to paint it on caves.

Question 7: Don't you think that the strength of cartoons comes precisely from the fact that it is not fine art?

RC: I agree. It's not put on that pedestal. Someone once said that once the world of fine art embraces you, it's the kiss of death. For me, the thing hanging on the wall is just not... the printed book was the point, the magic thing.

AKC: [Holding The R Crumb Handbook] There are some great photos of us in there, a great CD of all his music.

RC: Everything but the kitchen sink in there.

AKC: It's such a deal. And here's my hard sell - you should buy three: one for your greasy fingers, one for a gift or for posterity, and the third one to sell on eBay when you're broke next year. I get them free but that's what I would do if I were you.

Question 8: Mrs Crumb, are you still sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny?

AKC: Me? I was never sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny.

Questioner: I believe Mr Crumb was.

RC: Come on, I was five years old.

Question 9: Did you read Sartre?

RC: Hell is other people. Of course.

AKC: He even did the Illustrated Nausea.

SB: I saw your Beginner's Guide to Kafka, that was wonderful. Weird but great.

RC: I love Kafka. He's a guy that I suspect wrote in a hypnagogic state. He had this day job and lived in this noisy house with his family and so I think he did a lot of his writing when he was half asleep. It's really great.

AKC: When I read Kafka, I thought, "Perfect, this is my husband."

RC: The whole visceral element of life is just horrifying. How can you not be horrified? But she doesn't, she's so well adjusted.

Question 10: What was it like being filmed for that Terry Zwigoff documentary and having that go out to a wide audience?

RC: Terry Zwigoff was an old friend of mine, so I felt comfortable around the guy. So he'd bring his film crew in - it was a nightmare, but I let him do it.

AKC: It was over a long period of time.

RC: Yeah, over six or seven years.

AKC: He never had any money, so he'd film just a little bit.

RC: And then come back with his fucking film crew every time he had some money. It was awful.

AKC: Honestly, we never thought he would finish the film, and that even if he did finish it, it would be banned and nobody would see it.

RC: We thought it might be seen in a few art theatres or something. We never thought... her mother saw it at the local multiplex in Miami. She called up and said - because in the film Aline makes fun of her mother - and she said, "I just wanna tell you, I was very hurt."

RC: And what did you tell her?

AKC: I said, "It's a joke, like what stand-up comedians do. It's a generalisation. I would never say that about you." And we never talked about it again.

Question 11: How did you start listening to and collecting 78rpm records? What do you like about the music?

RC: I'm an anal obsessive character to begin with. I have to collect something. At eight or nine, I was obsessively collecting comic books, bottle caps, holy cards from Catholic schools, anything. Then I just went on the records. I could go on and on about what I love about the music - to me it's so much more genuine and authentic than modern mass media, which to me is so contrived. These people were mainly playing live to people from their own milieu and recording was a secondary thing, not a way to make a living. It's just more real to me. I first heard this old music in the old Popeye cartoons that we were talking about from the early 30s, great music in those old cartoons. Then I got this little plastic radio in the late 50s and I tuned in to these local stations that played church music from local small town churches. That stuff was dying out from radio by then.

Question 12: You played in a band in London about 10 years ago - do you still do it?

RC: That was with a band of French guys. I don't play any more, I like the music, but I can't take the crap that goes around it.

AKC: You can get the CD in the book. It's got music from all the bands he's been in.

RC: Covers my entire 30-year musical career. I got tired just having to go out and deal with the public.

Question 13: In the last 10 years what have been the chief challenges in your life and where do you see yourself in 10 years?

RC: I don't know. I just take it from day to day these days. No idea.

AKC: He's embarking on a long project that he doesn't want to talk about. It's going to take at least two years, this project, which is secret.

SB: It's not secret. Robert's doing the Book of Genesis, straight.

AKC: He doesn't want to talk about it because that would dissipate the energy. So you'll just have to wait.

SB: Why don't you do the Book of Revelation; top and tail the Bible? Presumably you're not going to work your way through?

RC: That would take a lifetime. First I got fascinated by the Adam and Eve story, and then I just decided to do the whole Genesis thing.

AKC: It's juicy.

RC: It is. It's rich. Can't make that stuff up.

AKC: You hope that it'll offend...

RC: I don't have to offend them. I just want to make them to see, like, the scene where Abraham is having sex with his daughter-in-law, who is faking being a temple priestess. That's in the Bible. How will they take that, I don't know. I'm just going to do what's in there. It tends to get glossed over. It's surprising what's actually in there, when you read it closely.

SB: So, it's not like you've suddenly got a burst of religion.

RC: I'm a religious kind of guy, in my own personal way.

AKC: Mystical.

RC: I ask God to help me sometimes - "God help me!"

Question 14: Who do you rate among the younger generation of cartoonists?

RC: I worry about that sometimes - so naively revealing so much of herself. Bunch of young artists are doing good work - it's kind of heartbreaking that these young people are doing comics and there's just no percentage in that at all.

AKC: Joe Sacco's great. Chris Ware.

RC: There are some people younger than them, in their 20s, who are doing great work. Some interesting stuff that you see in photocopied fanzines. But it's hard for a lot of people to do this over the long haul - you get tired of doing stuff where it's so much work but so little money. A lot of people can only do this when they're young, but once you have a family and a job, you get house payments... they have to buckle down and do commercial art.

AKC: Or make films like Dan Clowes; if they're really good, they get Hollywood deals.

RC: Those are the lucky ones. I see a lot of them come and go - good work for a few years and then they burn out.

AKC: Since we started, there's been at least two generations of cartoonists. We're gramps and granny over here.

SB: I think we have time for just one more question.

Question 15: What was it like, editing Weirdo magazine?

RC: It was a pain in the ass. It was interesting but it got old fast because you could never make everybody happy, neither the readers nor the artists. Someone would like something and hate something else, and somebody else would be exactly the opposite. Huge time-consuming thing. Then I handed it over to Aline after eight issues and she handled it for another eight issues. And she went through the same process. Then I took it back from her and handed it over to Peter Bagge. And he got tired after about nine issues.

AKC: You had to handletter the whole letters column - that was just incredibly torturous.

RC: Then we had to take it over to the publisher who was this skinflint and we had to stand over him to make sure that he signed cheques to the artists, otherwise nobody would have got paid.

AKC: I used to be there all day waiting for him to sign all the cheques for these ungrateful artists.

RC: After we stopped doing it, I was clearing out the Weirdo file and I kept finding these angry letters from artists complaining that they never got their artwork back and stuff.

AKC: One artist threatened to sue me and he started getting Jew paranoia.

RC: He became an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier because of you.

AKC: That was the last issue for me.

RC: It didn't make a cent.

SB: Well, we look forward to your book, Aline. At this point, we'd like to say, Robert Crumb, this was your life. Thank you.